Telkom reports surge in fixed and mobile network traffic

Telkom says it has seen a surge in fixed and mobile network traffic for its telco services from people working from home during the lockdown period in South Africa, which started nearly six weeks ago.

The country has since began a gradual and phased recovery of economic activity from 1 May 2020.

The group said it has a scalable network and enough redundancy to manage the increase in demand.

“Significant investments made in modernising the network including fibre backhaul has enabled us to carry more traffic on our network, giving us the resilience of our network to support this increase. Telkom’s mobile footprint capacity has been improved
with new sites and increased radio capacity on existing sites.

“The assignment of additional spectrum, on a temporary basis, will enable us to alleviate congestion in identified sites,” it said in a statement on Tuesday (5 May).

Telkom said that preserving cash and maintaining a flexible balance has become of utmost importance and urgent during Covid-19 pandemic as the economy is under strain. “Our conservative funding approach ensured that we continue to have a healthy balance sheet.”

The company said it will utilise a two-month extension period afforded to issuers by regulators.

It said that the institution of the lockdown has impeded its ability to complete the necessary work required to finalise the annual results by 25 May 2020. Given that the company’s financial year end is 31 March 2020, it said it will issue its annual
results on 22 June 2020.